Too Bad It's Cold

Most of the time, all Bow uses his language skills for is to ask for food, or water or a blanket or companionship or to go outside. If you only use language to ask for things, then it's not really considered language by some researchers. That's one of the things Nim Chimpsky was criticized for. That, and the fact that most of his remarks were elicited in response to what seemed like a prompt on the same subject.

Bow has said some pretty interesting things in the past, but not lately. Lately, he keeps most of his thoughts to himself, as many teens do. But yesterday, out of the blue, Bow spelled: חבל שקר -- "Too bad it's cold."

Rue anemone in my woods

It has been unusually cold, despite all the beautiful spring flowers  blooming outside.

Lilac at Orchard House

"Too bad it's cold."

That's a pretty inane remark, but not one he has ever made before, and not what we were talking about. I asked him what he wanted. He was reluctant to tell me. No, he did not want a blanket. No, he did not want to go outside. Just this: too bad it's cold. It's not a request. Not a complaint. Just an observation.

And Then The Mowers Came

It has been very cool lately. At lunch yesterday I was wearing a jacket. I decided to give Bow only my pinkie to spell with.

Bow was discouraged at first, and he took a break from his spelling to gaze despondently at the windy landscape through the the front door. But then he took up the task and asked for an apple.

Things went more smoothly when Bow requested his meat dish, which was actually the main course for lunch. He finished the entire meal, and then the mowers came.

Bow gets very excited whenever he sees the mowers. He watched them for a while through the front door window.

When he had tired of watching them from the inside, he took my pinkie and spelled בואי אתי החוצה  -- "Come outside with me!"

This is very different from what he usually says when he wants to go outside. Usually he just writes "Let me go outside." But apparently this time he wanted my company.

While the mowers mowed, Brownie took some time to dig a nice big hole in the back yard.

Bow was pretty complacent at this point, and I was able to leave him for a moment out there and pick my daughter up from school, as the bus did not run locally yesterday for some reason. By the time I got back, Bow was ready to come in, and the grass was already mowed.

In the evening, we had a beautiful sunset. If you look closely at the front lawn in the picture above, you can see that it is freshly mown. The wildflowers that sprang up there are gone, but their memories live on.

A violet that once was

Native Wood Violet Postcard

The Status Quo

Outside it is raining this morning.

In the pens, we are having a bit of a battle of wills.

Bow keeps gesturing to me that he wants me to give him my hand, and I keep telling him that he can spell by himself.  I want things to change, and he wants everything to remain exactly the same.

When you are in a state of equilibrium, sometimes you don't notice when a major status changing crisis is right around the corner. Things seem the same day after day.

The wildflowers in the woods are blossoming, and in the unmown lawn what look like tiny, miniature irises are springing up.

Soon the mowers will come, and this flower will be no more, and the entire state of equilibrium that it was counting on to grow will be gone. Things may seem like a steady state, but there are cycles that come and go.

When something cataclysmic is about to happen to us, we don't always know. It may seem to come out of nowhere, but there are usually signs.

The ants have been on patrol for three days and counting on the peony by the lagoon.

They have not harmed the flower head, but they clearly have some objective in mind, something not known to me.

Bow is not angry with me, and I am not angry with him. We just each want something different. To try to cajole me, he picks up tiny specks of dust and hair from the corners of his pen and throws them into the potty. See, he seems to be saying, I am keeping it tidy. I am good. But still I will not give him my hand to use as a pointer. So he takes it and grooms it, instead,

Then he takes my hand and leads me to the letters on the glass. "But I want you to spell by yourself, Bow!" I slip out from his grasp. "Write 'give' by yourself," I tell him. In Hebrew, when Bow is speaking to me, it is just a three letter word תני. He spells it many times each day, when he is requesting things. But always he uses my hand as a pointer.

 I try to bargain with him, just as he earlier tried to bargain with me. "If you spell 'give' by yourself, I will let you use my hand for the rest of the sentence." But he is not swayed.

He keeps offering me his hand, but when I ask him to spell by himself, he turns away.

We can go on like this for hours. Nobody gets angry, but the status quo will not change.

It's a delicate equilibrium, but eventually something has got to give.

Just on the edge of the woods, where the lawn meets the trees, the delicate clover flowers sway in the breeze. Their life seems the same every day, but one day the mowers will come.

Just inside the woods, where it is no longer lawn, the cypress spurge is blooming. They say it is an invasive, and it grows in transition areas, that are neither fully wooded nor fully open. The balance of woods and fields on my land is changing. While it may seem that everything is always the same with me and Bow, that is also a delicate balance. Someday the status quo may change, and we might have our next big breakthrough.

You never know when a delicate flower is about to push up from the ground and bloom, not because you planted it yourself, but just because the seeds were there.

Negotiating Over the Future

Yesterday my daughter and I went shopping in the afternoon, and Lawrence stayed with Bow, fed him dinner and put him to bed.

This morning, when Bow woke up, he had a single dark navy blue sock on. Hmm, where did that sock come from? Was it a belated Christmas gift from Lawrence?

Anyway, Bow seemed very happy with his new article of footwear, and he kept the sock on all through breakfast, and when I cleared away breakfast, and he still had it on when he took my hand and spelled:  אני רוצה לצאת  "I want to go outside."

"Okay," I answered. "Give me the sock, and you can go outside."

He took my hand and with a bit of savage anger spelled:     ! לא    "No!"

(He didn't actually spell the exclamation mark. We don't have punctuation on the glass, but his manner when he spelled "no" was such that it proclaimed: And I really mean this!)

No means no. If I had tried to take that sock away from him by force, I had every expectation of being scratched or bitten. Bow has an absolute right to everything on his person, and nobody, but nobody messes with him. So I waited.

A few minutes later, he took my hand and again spelled out that he wanted to go outside. Again, I told him he could go, but not with the sock on.  This time he did not reply verbally. He just extended the foot with the sock out to me, and he allowed me to gently remove the sock. I placed it in my pocket and started to unlock the door. As I was doing this, Bow reached into my pocket.

"Bow!"

He withdrew his hand. With chimpanzees, possession is nine tenths of the law. Since I had the sock, he realized he would be violating my space if he took it by force. If he did that, I would be perfectly within my rights to lash out at him with my claws and my powerful jaw! (This would not, however, prevent him from taking it by stealth, if I did not notice, because Bow is not the most honest or upright person I know.)

After he was done playing outside, Bow asked to have the sock back, and I gave it to him. It is. after all. his sock! I just didn't want him to get it wet and dirty outside.

Bow and I are civilized enough to negotiate over the things we want. We are capable of  verbalizing our conflicting positions and coming to a compromise. In some ways, that is just as remarkable as the fact that Bow can spell out words. We don't have to physically fight over an object. We can talk about it.

But here's the thing: I desperately want to have proof of his literacy, because to me it would mean:

• professional vindication
• the possibility of getting funding
• a way to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge accumulated by my species and culture

Now those might seem like greedy, selfish  motives on my part, but there you are. I'm being honest about it. That's what I want. The reason this would be a good thing for Bow, too, and why he ought to support my efforts is this:

• He is dependent on my money for his food and shelter.
• If we had funding, he could have a mate and friends of his own species.
• His social status would be greatly improved if people knew how smart he is. It might even be a triumph of sorts for his entire species.

However, I am having trouble convincing Bow that he has something to gain from helping me prove it. It would not actually take Bow free-form spelling to make a dent in the resistance to my claims. Even a multiple choice computerized test where Bow was asked to match spoken words with their written equivalent would do it. But Bow is resistant to this idea, and I kind of understand how he feels.

I have always hated multiple choice tests, because they are not about expressing what I really think. It is more like validating the preconceived opinions of the test writer. It is a little like this conversation that I have actually  had with someone recently:

"Do you think my outfit is pretty?"

"I think it's charming."

"No, I didn't ask you that. Is it pretty? The only possible answers are: it's pretty or it's not pretty."

"Oh. Well, in that case, I think it's pretty."

"Thanks."

The multiple choice test is not about self expression. It's not about providing the test giver with new information.  It's about showing that you know the right answer according to the person formulating the test. And Bow, so far, has been completely unwilling to play that game. 

Now, if only I could figure out a way to negotiate with him so that he will be willing to play the game for the sake of both our futures!